'Zimbabwe has a leadership concerned only with accumulation of power'

A political analyst Vince Musewe has said the Zimbabwean leadership is only obsessed with harnessing power and wealth at the expense of development and this has crumbled the nation.

"The question is what must we do to create the Zimbabwe we want? First, we must understand why we are where we are now. For me, the fundamental cause is that of predatory leadership. We have a political leadership that is clearly more concerned with the accumulation of personal power and wealth at the expense of development," Musewe said.

"Until that changes, we are bound not to witness any significant allocation and efficient use of state resources for infrastructure development. Even if that happens, we have seen how large infrastructure projects are undertaken as a source of enrichment. This compromises their cost of delivery and quality. As a result, the country will not necessarily be better off, but will end up with expensive low-quality infrastructure that needs constant maintenance and repairs at a very high cost."

Musewe said the government must create an environment that encourages domestic savings and attract long-term infrastructure development.

"We tend to rely too much on borrowing for our developmental projects and this continuously compromises what we can do and how we can do it. In most cases those countries that lend us money insist of merely transferring their technologies to us thus limiting our choices," he said.

"We need an accountable government that collects and manages resources efficiently. This goes back to ethical and competent political leadership. Our taxes must be collected efficiently and fairly while our natural and mining resources must be managed effectively to generate revenue that can be reinvested in the economy and increase its productive capacity. There must be accountability on how our resources are used and this must be underpinned by punishing those that are found to be corrupt. Zimbabwe has too many secret infrastructure deals that create massive future liabilities for tax payers without accountability."

He said once the country has done that it can then look at the various infrastructure development models that are appropriate for our country.

"According to international research developing countries such as Zimbabwe should be investing at least 6% of GDP in capital formation. We are far away from this figure as the economy collapses due to de-industrialisation," he said.